bump

More use video sharing

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are already looking ahead to 2014, and the outlook for the year seems positive. The Sagefrog Marketing Group surveyed US B2B marketing and management professionals from a cross-section of industries in the summer of 2013 and found that 45% of respondents expected to see an increase in budgets in the next year, while 52% thought their outlays would remain the same.

The top four most popular marketing channels for B2Bs were all digital, according to the survey. Websites were the most uniformly employed technique, used by 85% of those polled. Email marketing was second at 72%, followed by social media (67%) and search engine optimization (56%). Just under half of respondents relied on trade shows, while four in 10 used direct marketing.

Eighty-four percent of B2B marketers used social networks this year, up from 79% in 2012, while both blogs and microblogs saw a decline in B2B use this year. Photo sharing also saw a precipitous decline over the last year. Video sharing, however, continued its growth trend, in use by 37% of surveyed B2B marketers.

In September, B2B Magazine released an analysis of data from Kantar Media, which found that ad spending among t! he top 50 B2B advertisers in the US had increased by 4.8% between 2011 and 2012 for a total of almost $4.3 billion. However, the only channels that saw ad spending growth were television, outdoor and consumer magazines. Online display ad spending dropped by 1.3%, according to B2B Magazine. Still, online display ads accounted for 10.5% of US B2B ad spending, behind only television (59.6%).

US ad spending increased by 3.5% year-over-year in the second quarter of the year to reach $35.8 billion, dragging first-half expenditures up by 2% to $68.9 billion, per the latest figures from Kantar Media. TV’s 6.4% bump in spending buoyed the overall totals, with TV’s increase partly a result of NCAA Final Four basketball games being counted in the Q2 rather than Q1 figures. The researchers also note that the year-over-year gain is exaggerated by dampened spend in Q2 2012 as advertisers pulled back in advance of the Summer Olympics.

Advertisement

The total spending figures may actually underestimate growth, as Kantar’s online spending estimates only include display advertising, which the report says increased by 4.1% for the quarter. (Given the recent growth trajectory of online ad spending, it’s more likely that online ad spending growth was somewhere in the double digits.)

Search advertisers must meet consumers where they conduct their web activity

As smartphones and tablets play an increasingly dominant role in consumers’ daily web activities, advertisers are putting more dollars to paid search ads on the devices. According to Q2 2013 research from digital marketing solutions company IgnitionOne, US mobile paid search spend more than doubled year over year on both smartphones and tablets. By comparison, total search spend was up only 7% over Q2 2012.

Tablets saw a slightly bigger bump in spending and delivered impressions, but smartphones grew more robustly in terms of clicks, as more users tapped on paid search links on their phones. In keeping with this, the cost-per-click (CPC) on smartphones got cheaper, down by 13%, while tablets’ CPCs were up 13%.

There are some caveats on this one which we’ll get to, but Apple had a really good holiday quarter compared to its rivals.

comScorereports Apple had 37.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market for the three months ending in January. Samsung, meanwhile, had 21.4 percent of the market. Apple’s market share was up 3.5 percent compared to the three months ending in October. Samsung was up 1.9 percent.

As for the iOS versus Android market share battle, Apple was 37.8 percent versus 52.3 percent for Android. Apple was up 3.5 percent, while Android was actually down 1.5 percent.

This is good news for Apple, but as we said there are caveats:

Apple does very well in the U.S. It does not do as well elsewhere in the world.

The holiday period was when Apple really launched the iPhone 5. Samsung, meanwhile, was selling the Galaxy S III, an older smartphone model. It only makes sense for Apple to! experie nce a bump in this period.

We’ll see how Apple holds up over the next three to six months as the hype of the iPhone 5 dies off and the hype for the Galaxy S IV cranks into gear.

All that said, considering the Samsung buzz, you would have thought it was killing Apple. These numbers show that Apple can still hold its own.

Google Shopper has just gotten the bump to version 3.0 with an update that brings a roster of fresh features, including a new UI with speedier navigation and larger images. In addition to the fresh coat of paint, the app sports a brand-new sales screen, image-focused search results and product ratings provided by GoodGuide. Page and Co. have also thrown in push notifications to keep users abreast of new features and content, and an area to showcase retail promotions. Itching to start penny pinching? Hit the source link below for the download.

According to the survey, 78 percent of likely voters polled had positive views of the way that the president has handled the “super storm” – a number that includes two-thirds of Romney’s supporters. In contrast, just 44 percent of those surveyed had a net positive view of how the Republican candidate responded to the storm.

The chart below breaks down those results:

It is too early to tell, however, if that support for Obama will affect his overall standing in the race. The results of the four-day tracking survey include only one night of interviews with voters after the storm hit, so we will have to wait for Thursday and Friday’s results to see if the storm has any real effect on the dynamics of the presidential race.

Overall, Obama and Romney are tied, 49% to 49%, among likely voters. Those numbers are consistent with the rest of the poll’s results, which have shown the race between one point since daily tracking began on October 18.

Netflix saw a return to profitability and more than half a million new US subscribers in the second quarter of this year, and it’s now announced that it’s added a full two million more streaming members worldwide for the third quarter. That brings the company’s global base of streaming subscribers to 29 million, 25.1 million of which are in the US. It’s also announced another bump in profits to $8 million in net income, with global revenue of $905 million. It’s unsurprisingly a different story when it comes to DVD subscriptions in the US, however, with the company reporting a drop from 9.24 million total subscribers in Q2 to 8.61 million in Q3.

In terms of usage, Netflix says that its streaming members have now consumed over three billion hours of content, and that TV shows now account for about two thirds of that viewing activity. The company has also reiterated its commitment to original programming in its letter to shareholders, although it notes that commitment comes with some front-loaded expenses that will result in negative free cash flow for the next “several quarters” beginning with Q4. The company further adds that it believes “investment in originals is wise, and we will evaluate the performance of the slate next year to determine at what level we should fund additional original.” You can find the full letter and all the numbers at the source link below.

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

If you’ve ever thought “Hey, my internet is pretty slow, maybe I can get a second line and combine them into one big, zippy connection!” then you’re not alone — those of us who are broadband-deprived need all the help we can get. But a quick tour through Google will show you the difficulty of doing that process, called “bonding,” at home. So, Connectify has proposed Dispatch, software that lets you easily combine your WiFi, ethernet and 3G/4G into a single, fat pipe, at a reasonable cost. The company brings along wireless sharing know-how from its Hotspot product to the project, and promises that with every connection you combine, you’ll get a corresponding bump in throughput. Also, the system will automatically failover to a good connection if one goes on the fritz, and even switch automatically between WiFi and 3G/4G to maximize speed and save money.

To prove the tech, the company combined all the available open WiFi networks in a neighborhood along with a tethered Verizon mobile phone, and were able to create an impressive 85Mbs connection, as the video below the break shows. So far, Connectify ha! s vacuum ed up $30K for Dispatch toward the $50K objective, with about two weeks left. So, if you’re desperate for more speed, or just want to trump your neighbor’s bandwidth by stealing his WiFi and melding it with your ADSL, check the source to see how to pledge.

The Average Selling Price (ASP) of Apple’s iPad has fallen more than $100 in the past year.

The iPad’s ASP has dropped significantly since it was first introduced, which is not surprising, but it appears Apple wasn’t able to produce a bump in the ASP this year by introducing a new model, the way it did last year.

The iPhone’s ASP, on the other hand, has been remarkably stable since the beginning of 2009, despite Apple’s introduction of lower-cost options. The disparity probably reflects the relative maturity of the smartphone market versus the tablet market, where Apple is starting to shed its near-total dominance.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.